Mrinal Wadhwa

Presenting Flex 4 Component Lifecycle at FlexMania

Mrinal Wadhwa — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 00:52:09 +0000

FlexMania is a Brazilian online event organized by Igor Costa. The event is focused on the Flash Platform and has a great collection of Flash/Flex/AIR related talks.

Although, most of the talks are in portuguese, there are some interesting english sessions as well like Laura Arguello on Mate Framework, Stephen Downs (a.k.a Tink) on Efflex and Iiley Chen on AsWing

I will also be presenting in english, my talk is “A Flex 4 Component’s Lifecycle” on Monday, July 6th at 15:30 GMT.

RECORDING: Here’s the 1hr long Adobe Connect recording of the talk from FlexMania

SLIDES AND CODE: The slides and code from the talk can be found here

Flex 4 Component Lifecycle (Slides and Code)

Mrinal Wadhwa — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 17:52:42 +0000

I gave a talk this Friday on the lifecycle of a component in Flex 4. The talk went into the details of how the flash player works, why a component needs a lifecycle and the various stages of a components life.

UPDATE: I gave the same talk at FlexMania .. Here’s the 1hr long Adobe Connect recording

Here are the slides and experimental code from the talk …

Here’s the code we played with to understand how frame rates work in the flash player …

FrameRates.as

Here’s the code we wrote with to understand the Elastic Racetrack …

ElasticRaceTrack.as

Here’s the experiment to understand marshaled slices …

MarshaledSlices.as

Download Slides
Download Source Code

The presentation was slightly long and I’ve already heard that some people found it boring but I hope that wasn’t the case for everyone

I would like to thank all the awesome people in the Flash/Flex community who have helped me understand all this by publishing some great articles and blog posts … here are just some of the articles that I’ve found very useful …

Ted Patrick on the Elastic Racetrack
Sean Christmann’s Updated ‘Elastic Racetrack’ for Flash 9 and AVM2
Ely Greenfrield on Building a Flex Component [PDF] (Thanks Ted Patrick for making it available on his blog)
“Diving Deep With the Flex Component Lifecycle,” by Brad Umbaugh and RJ Owen
White Paper by the guys at Development Arc on Component Lifecycle

Please do let me know what you thought of my talk and how I can improve it.

Flex 4 Component Lifecycle

Mrinal Wadhwa — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 09:43:50 +0000

I’ll be presenting a talk on Flex 4 Component Lifecycle at the next Bangalore Flex User Group Meeting on 19th.

The talk will be an in depth walk through of the life cycle of a component in Flex 4. The Flex 4 component model (Spark) is built on top of Flex 3 component model (Halo), so we will also take a detailed look at the Flex 3 lifecycle.

I am not planning to do a feature by feature overview of new features in Flex 4, so it would help if you already know a little bit about that. These articles are a good place to start ..

Matt Chotin on What’s new in Flex 4 Beta
Joan Lafferty on Differences between Flex 3 and Flex 4 beta

Check out the event page for registration and other details.

Look forward to seeing you all there.

UPDATE: I’ve posted the slides and code from the talk here

I’m now an SAP Mentor

Mrinal Wadhwa — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 22:15:57 +0000

As some of you on twitter may have seen me mention today morning, I’m now an SAP Mentor.

The Mentors’ website defines …

The SAP Mentor Initiative identifies and provides special status to exceptional and high-value members of our SAP Developer Network (SDN) and Business Process Expert (BPX) communities.

SAP Mentors are role models who differentiate themselves through the high quality and frequency of their community contributions, their perspectives, attitudes, and interaction styles. They are subject-matter experts who are passionate about SAP and share their opinions and insights with the community.

It’s truely an honor to be named along with such an extraordinary group of people, some of the brightest brains in the SAP world …. like Marilyn Pratt, Dennis Hewlett, Anne Petteroe, Dick Hirsch, Darren Hague, Michael Bechauf, Craig Cmehil, Ed Herrmann, Thomas Jung, Dan McWeeney, Blag, Abesh (the list goes on …) a mere conversation with some of these people has the potential of blowing your brains out … I deeply respect all of them, so I’m humbled, I’ve been given such a great opportunity to learn.

I also see this as an excellent opportunity to evangelize and promote RIAs in the enterprise, I strongly believe that enterprise applications can gain a lot by adopting RIA ideologies, so I look forward to mangling together my experiences in the Adobe and SAP worlds.

Adobe BrowserLab: Cross browser testing Nirvana

Mrinal Wadhwa — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 07:14:55 +0000

Adobe has just released BrowserLab (formerly Meer Meer). Quoting their website, the tool lets you ..

“Preview and test your web pages on leading browsers and operating systems – on demand. Adobe BrowserLab makes it easier and faster than ever before to see how your designs appear to your customers and audience. Get your results in real time, from virtually any computer connected to the web”

This is a snapshot of 2 views of my blog .. one on Firefox 3 – OSX and other on Firefox 3 – Windows XP .. onion skinned on top of each other …

Anyone who has built and deployed HTML+JavaScript+CSS websites knows that cross browser testing can be a pain. I think BrowserLab is a great addition to a web developers toolbox.

FXG paths to Flex components convertor

Mrinal Wadhwa — Fri, 08 May 2009 10:39:59 +0000

While working on a project yesterday I needed to convert several vectors (hundreds of them) into reusable Flex 4 visual elements that I could then use in my skins, so lets say if I have vectors of chess pieces that I would like to use in my Skin as follows …

Since I needed these in several skin files I did not want to deal with clunky Path elements which would’ve looked something like this..

So I created a quick AIR application …. that that converts the elements into AS3 classes that extend from spark.primitives.Path and look something like this …

This way all my path data sits in one place I can use this library of visual elements in a reusable way across several applications and changing something would be really easy. Also, unlike the generated code from Flash Catalyst (Thermo) all my components are not inside Groups which are fairly heavy components.

Watch this quick video of a detailed demo of how to use the tool …

If you think this is something useful for you to ….

Download and Install

Since I did this in very little time the code is quick and dirty but it works and is available under the Apache 2.0 License on Google Code so feel free to to modify for your own needs.

View Source at Google Code

An after thought was that this should probably not be called FXG to Component since the generated classes do not inherit from UIComponent but instead from Path which is a GraphicElement. Anyways, who cares as long as it does what its supposed to do.

Please do let me know if you find this useful.

What is User Experience Design?

Mrinal Wadhwa — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 23:52:12 +0000

Saurabh twittered a link to a somewhat old post by Kimmy Paluch .. as I read through the post I was very impressed with the visual she uses to explain the various facets that make up User Experience Design ..

Augmenting reality using Flash

Mrinal Wadhwa — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 10:09:08 +0000

I gave a talk about Augmenting Reality at Devcamp Bangalore this Saturday. In the talk I did some live coding to show how you can use Saqoosha’s FLARToolkit AS3 library to add 3D objects to a webcam video in real-time … here’s a video recording of the application we created during the session … it adds a cow to reality ..

The core idea behind FLARToolkit (which is an AS3 port of ARToolkit) as I understand it … is that it can detect if a given pattern is present in a bitmap, if so .. then where is it located and how much has it been transformed in 3D space. Once we have this information .. we can manipulate the bitmap (or a frame of video from a webcam in our case) to add virtual objects that can be moved and transformed same as the pattern. If this is done over each frame of the movie coming from the webcam it creates the illusion of a real object being added to the video and the object moves around as we move the pattern in reality.

Here’s the code with detailed comments on how this is achieved … You can download the complete project here.

Try it out yourself …

Print out this marker pattern [pdf]
You’ll need a webcam
Visit this application
Allow it to use your webcam
Move the pattern in front of the webcam
You should see a virtual cow moving with it.

References

Here are the various places where I got a lot of this information from ..

Saqoosha’s getting started article
Mikko Haapoja’s post on Getting Started with FLARToolkit
Lee Brimelow’s video tutorial at gotondlearn
FLARToolkit source and examples

I hope everyone who came to my talk enjoyed it .. I would love to hear any feedback that you may have.

Also a very special thankyou to the all the guys who were behind organizing Devcamp, I had a great time and learned a lot.

Using Titanium to do things AIR can’t do …

Mrinal Wadhwa — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 00:58:00 +0000

Adobe AIR is a extraordinary platform and the core idea behind AIR i.e enabling web developers to build desktop apps has been revolutionary. But, there are things about AIR that are very limiting as a developer … many real world applications need much more interaction with the desktop than AIR allows, yes Adobe has valid security related reasons not to allow this but once users allow you to install an application on their desktop they expect features that AIR doesn’t allow you to implement … not being able to do trivial things like .. launch a file in its default application or register a global keyboard shortcut is sometimes frustrating and has led to developers putting together things like The Merapi Project .. which quite frankly is a hack to work around the core problem .. inextensibility of AIR as a platform.

This is exactly why Titanium, although very new and not entirely mature, is extremely interesting as an option to deploy desktop applications developed using web technologies. Titanium has this concept of Modules that allows you to extend the run time in any which way you like. Besides that, Titanium, just with the bundled in set of modules, is much more friendly with the desktop and has features like invoking applications, starting and controlling processes etc.

I’ve built a simple Application Launcher as an example that uses Flex/Flash as the front-end technology and Titanium as a runtime. Launcher can be used to launch any application that is installed on your system .. this is something that cannot be built with AIR.

Here’s the source ..

Just like several other times when dealing with ExternalInterface Abdul’s Javascript MXML Tag was very useful.

Compiled Distributable for OSX

(I haven’t compiled the Linux and Windows versions since Jeff Haynie told me on IRC that Titanium is releasing PR3 today that will allow cross platform compilation from any one platform .. so i will post the other distributables tomorrow)

Flash Player Internals

Mrinal Wadhwa — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 05:54:37 +0000

I’ve noticed on several occasions that developers starting out with Flex ignore the underlying player and focus their attention on the high level Flex framework … but I feel that it is extremely important to understand Flash Player and its abilities as well to be successful at writing great Flex applications … remember that the only things that you can do with the Flex framework are things that the core Flash Player API allows you to do and nothing more … the Flex framework is just a library making it easier to use that core functionality that the Player provides.

Peter Elst highlighted this presentation on his blog, but I think its important enough to be highlighted again …

Flash Player Internals,
presented by Jim Corbett and Lee Thomason at Adobe MAX.

Understanding the Flex Component Lifecycle

Mrinal Wadhwa — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 16:05:35 +0000

Someone recently asked me how to go about understanding the Flex Component Lifecycle .. my usual answer to this is to go read the documentation, then the source of UIComponent and a few basic components like Label, Button etc. .. I also sometimes point people to the Building A Flex Component [PDF] presentation from Ely Greenfield which I’ve found useful in the past … this time though, I was also reminded of some recent presentations I had seen on the subject and found interesting .. so I thought I’ll share them here as well ..

Diving Deep With the Flex Component Lifecycle,
presented by Brad Umbaugh and RJ Owen at 360 | Flex, San Jose.

Creating New Components in Flex 3,
presented by Deapa Subramaniam at MAX 2008

Also, while we’re on the subject, if you’re in Bangalore you should consider attending this Friday’s Bangalore Flex User Group meeting where Chetan Sachdev will be presenting a talk on Custom Components and the Component Lifecycle.

New Look

Mrinal Wadhwa — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 07:05:25 +0000

Its been a few days over two years since I started writing this blog and all this time it has looked the same. I started out using the Hemingway theme by Kyle Neath and really liked the way it looked …

Over time though, I became quite bored of that look and I also received some negative feedback relating to how people find it uncomfortable to read white text on a black background. Also, it was always disconcerting to see another blog use the same theme as mine so I’d been planning to make a personalized theme of my own for a while. I finally got to it and went ahead and designed this new look …

Hoping to save some time, I sought help from my friends at Blog Design Studio to help me build the wordpress theme, who I think did an excellent job.

I’m no “designer” so please do let me know what you think of the design.

New Name

Another major change that you may notice here is that this blog is no longer called “Rags to Riches : en route to a richer Internet”. When I came up with the name it was intended to be a play on words to represent the evolution of our Internet from lame old web pages to engaging rich experiences. But, I started hating the name only a few weeks into it… I didn’t think it conveyed what I write about properly.

I would love to know what you all think of the changes and would really appreciate any feedback that you may have. Hope you continue to enjoy reading what I write.

[On SDN] Make phone calls from SAP applications with Flash Islands and Ribbit

Mrinal Wadhwa — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 11:53:20 +0000

When I first heard of SAP Flash Islands I thought it was a game changing move in the SAP world and went so far as to describe it as Enterprise UI 2.0 … I’ve played a little with Flash Islands since then and I just blogged on SAP Developer Network about an experiment I did with SAP Web Dynpro Flash Islands and Ribbit to allow making phone calls from an SAP application.

The blog post shares code on how to do this and also tries to explain SAP Flash Islands from a Flex developer’s perspective ….

Check out the SDN post for more

PANIC !!! Google disabled my account

Mrinal Wadhwa — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 02:35:36 +0000

A few hours ago Google just abruptly disabled my primary Google Account – mrinal [dot] wadhwa [at] gmail. I can’t login and all email to that account is failing and yes I’m panicking … my life runs through that account and it has been that way for over five years.. so this is scary !

All the suggested help doesn’t seem to be working so I’ve written to Google Support and hopefully things will be back to normal soon.

Meanwhile, I can still be reached at email [at] mrinalwadhwa.com ….

UPDATE:

About 20 hours after this happened Google enabled my account again, Thank you Google. Those were some painful 20 hours, but I’m just glad things are back to normal. Here’s the email I received from Google, what’s funny though is that they did not care to explain why this happened …

Hello,

Thank you for your report.

We apologize for any inconvenience you may have experienced. The issue you described should now be resolved. If you continue to experience difficulties, please respond to this message, and we’ll investigate further.

Sincerely,

The Google Team

Image courtesy LunaDiRimmel

Adobe RIAthon and why I chose not to participate …

Mrinal Wadhwa — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 13:31:58 +0000

Adobe India has been running a very interesting contest these past few months called RIAthon

The idea is simple, you build some cool RIAs using Adobe technologies and if Adobe likes your work they give you some very cool prizes and a platform to showcase your work and your skills.

I was quite excited about the contest at first .. I had even thought of an idea for an app I would build, but after very little exploration I decided not to participate. Now that the contest is well underway and this blog post cannot negatively affect Adobe’s efforts in anyway since the Grand Finale of the contest is tomorrow… I think its appropriate for me to express why I made my decision …

Quoting the RIAthon terms and conditions ….

“Each Contestant agrees that if his or her entry is selected as a Finalist entry, as a condition of receiving a prize, Contestant shall sign a license agreement granting to Adobe a royalty-free, non-exclusive, perpetual, worldwide license to use, reproduce, distribute, publicly perform, publicly display, modify for purposes of publicly performing and publicly displaying, and prepare derivative works based upon winner’s entry, for the purposes of advertising and promoting Adobe products, and for inclusion in and distribution with Adobe products.”

My interpretation of this legal gibberish was that if my entry gets selected as a Finalist I will have to give away all rights to my code to Adobe … I don’t see why I should have to do that … I know, Adobe is spending money on the prizes and the event but they are getting back developer excitement, adoption of their technology, cool examples to show and a whole lot of marketing .. I don’t see why they need to own my code. The obvious question in my head was …. if I spend a week or two building this thing will I still own the rights to monetize it? … and I asked the same on this Flex India thread … but with no response. I’m pretty sure I asked at one more place, but I cant remember where … well eventually my excitement died out and I decided I wont participate.

I wonder if there were others who went through the same thought process as me … I also wonder if the people who’ve participated have actually read the terms. Anyway, I look forward to seeing some of the cool stuff people have built tomorrow at Flash Ahead.